Communications of the ACM
The Reality of Big Tech's 'Fake Work' Problem
One manager said Google "rewards bad behavior" by promoting people based on "having a bigger team and creating decks."
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As tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of employees this year, venture capitalists and executives have leaned on the term "fake work" to describe the output of some employees.
But the concept of lazy employees raking in big paychecks to do little lays the blame in the wrong place. "Most workers want to come and work," says Scott Latham, a strategic-management professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. There's only one real culprit for the culture of "fake work," he says. "It's lazy management."
Rich Moran, a venture capitalist and consultant, prefers to call it a "false sense of activity" and says it's "more rampant" among tech companies. "The tech sector is more willing to try different things," he says. Geting assigned to a project that may be going nowhere is by nature part of the industry's experimentation.
Many tech giants saw an explosion of demand for their products during the pandemic, and aggressively hired thousands of recruits. But firms often gave little thought about where to place them or what their role would be. That was "an accelerator for fake work because a lot of these tech companies hired," Moran says. "Then they weren't sure what to do with a lot of the people."
One former Google manager says she was instructed to lower her standards for hiring earlier in the pandemic and watched as teams she worked with doubled in size. As new hires flooded in, it felt as if teams were reorganized on a weekly basis.
From Business Insider
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